GOTY 2019
At the end of the year, I always like to take a look back on all the video games I played during these past 365 days. Usually I do Top 10 or Top 5 lists (or, like last year, no list at all), though for 2019 I've decided to do something different - short reviews on every game released this year that I have played a substantial amount of. As per usual, I won't go into detail about ports or remakes of games I've previously played here. Death End re;Quest(DEATH END LOGO) Death End re;Quest was one of the many games released this year that put a focus on blending the real and virtual worlds together, and honestly was one that I was looking forward to. The game tells the story of Arata Mizunashi as he tries to help the director of the game he served as the lead programmer on, Shina Ninomiya, from escaping from the digital landscape of World's Odyssey after having been missing for almost a year before this. The story itself is fairly generic, for the most part, as it sees the player switching between the real world perspective of Arata and his in-game avatar of Mr. Enigma, and having to interact with the two groups of characters to uncover the many mysteries that pop up around them all centred around a cyber terrorist attack for which their gaming company, Enigma, is blamed. Though the game boasts incredible designs for the characters and a fantastic battle system that combines action RPGs with turn-based ones, while also infusing a knockback system and the ability to "hack" the field to summon previous bosses as assists or change the genre of the game completely, most other aspects of Death End re;Quest fall short. The game's script, while excellently performed by talented voice actors, is lackluster at best - this is particularly notable with the character of Al Astra, who makes the same mistakes throughout the entire game with no growth - and many plot elements are dropped in completely out of the blue or without the significant amount of explanation to really make an impact - one of the major characters in the real world harbours a secret that, when revealed, made me more confused about the lore of Death End re;Quest and felt like a cheap way to escape a corner the writers had written themselves into. Barring the "Entoma Queen" bosses, the designs of the monsters are completely unmemorable, and while all of the main dungeons have their own aesthetics, the areas in-between all use identical assets, and every area is essentially made up of a series of hallways; though the dungeons feature "unique" aesthetics, they are rather plain in design and generally just generic as well: regal castle, forest, water temple, flying mystical island, ruins, and a shipyard. Without going into spoilers, the "normal route" of the game's story also ends on a very unsatisfactory note, literally telling the player directly to go through and complete all the other routes - I only completed the "normal route", which took me over 20 hours on its own, and my experience with the game was so unfavourable that I traded the game in later the same day. Recommend: No Zanki Zero: Last Beginning(ZANKI ZERO LOGO) Our World is Ended(OUR WORLD LOGO) AI: The Somnium Files(SOMNIUM FILES LOGO) Before the game came out, AI: The Somnium Files had a remarkable marketing campaign that made me far more interested in the game than I otherwise may have been. Spike Chunsoft and Somnium Files director Kotaro Uchikoshi put out videos starring the character of Iris Sagan (otherwise known as Tesa or A-set) as a virtual Youtuber. While these videos began with sillier topics, such as a music video and a video detailing A-set's favourite snack foods and video game mascots, these quickly evolved into her "accidentally" getting involved with a satanic cult known as NAIXATLOZ, and by the Game Developers Conference in March, she had outright been kidnapped after a mysterious video was uploaded to her channel. Gotta say, this marketing campaign kept me interested week-after-week, not only because A-set was an incredibly likeable character from the get-go, but because (as Uchikoshi tends to do) of all the small little details hidden in each video that I'd love to look for.